Linguistics Data Citation

History

The Austin Principles of Data Citation in Linguistics, in draft form, originated as an output of a three-year US National Science Foundation project called Developing Standards for Data Citation and Attribution for Reproducible Research in Linguistics(NSF SMA-1447886, Principal Investigators Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, Gary Holton, Susan Smythe Kung and Peter Pulsifer). This project, which began in 2015, supported a series of three workshops that brought together more than forty linguistics researchers, data scientists, language archivists, and linguistics journal editors, to discuss developing standards for the citation of linguistic data. The project culminated with a panel presentation at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America in Austin, Texas.

It was during this meeting of the LSA that the idea arose to develop a document that would help linguists internalize recent developments across the sciences with regard to how and why we should cite our data. FORCE11, “a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that […] help[s] facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing” (https://www.force11.org/about) had recently published their Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, which the participants in the NSF Data Citation project felt could be annotated to make it more relevant to linguists. Thus the Austin Principles were born. Drafting, commenting, and editing began in the summer of 2017.

Soon thereafter, the newly formed Linguistics Data Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance took over the solicitation of feedback on the Austin Principles from the general international linguistics community. The Austin Principles have now undergone several rounds of open commenting and editing, and will continue to be open for comments. New versions will appear as infrastructure and standards for data citation improve.

If you would like to add your comments and feedback to the discussion about the Austin Principles, please join the Linguistics Data Interest Group. Alternately, you can email the co-chairs of the LDIG at lingdata [at] hawaii [dot] edu.